The Noble Renaissance w/ Carrie Lloyd

[Music] i am liz wright welcome to live your best life the only thing that matters now is living by the power of this wonderful new creation life we're going to become an undefeatable force of radiating glory and we are rising up strong now in this hour [Music] hi family welcome to live your best life with me liz wright and i am very excited about today's conversation i have on with me today a very special woman of god she is a british journalist fellow brit who lives in america a lot of the time she's a pastor she's a podcast show host she's a successful author an activist and her new book which is absolutely incredible i'm going to get her to talk about it today i've been reading it and it absolutely gripped me it's called me higher it's called the noble renaissance and it's honestly it's such a timely message or i think it's a movement really i think it contains a movement the message is so important and it's so accessible and so empowering so with all of that said i just want to honor and welcome into the conversation with me today carrie lloyd carrie welcome hi oh it's so lovely it's so lovely to talk to you with a fellow british accent i don't know there is people are just going to be switching i get sometimes all the times on my cards and that you might get the same two lists where people will go you know i love listening to your podcast i i play it and i go to sleep listening like you're not going to go to sleep i do regularly i have had so many people carry over the last few years particularly saying i go to sleep with you every night just snuggled up listening to your your british dulcet tones i'm glad people are getting i actually for everybody watching around the world i just wanted to start by reading just a tiny extract from your book just to give a taste of what this is about and then just dive in and ask you a couple of questions i love this where you say nobility of course it's a noble renaissance right so nobility is letting heaven have a stronger presence in the smallest of moments so it's available for all of us right i just love it i love it and then no matter your background your creed your race or your preferences the jaw-dropping unique influence of the noble character is profound just amazing it's just see what i mean it's really inspirational i keep reading it and going this is who we are oh my goodness this is what's possible out of our lives you know whether the next gandhi or where you know whether we're seen or unseen whether we're called to we're here for great movements or we're not you know every moment matters and that's one of the things you get out of this book is you realize how significant each one of us is and every choice we make you know can change we don't know who we're influencing and we're moving the heart of god as we're living our life this way so i just think right now particularly when the world is in such a state and time as times are difficult for so many of us this is just a it's a road map of how we can do life well in the midst of really challenging times so just finishing just finishing that i wanted to read this a little bit because i actually read this and started crying so i've been crying and laughing a lot through the book as well we're just just reading this little bit there are thousands of stories like this for example the man who donated two hundred thousand air miles to strangers so they could go home to their families for christmas the buffalo firefighters who carried a man 10 blocks to mercy hospital note the name because the ambulance saving this man from a heart attack got stuck in a blizzard this is where i cried actually this one this next one really moved me the family who welcomed it welcomed a deaf baby into the world and discovered that 20 of their neighbors learned sign language before the baby's arrival a teenager who saved up for two years to buy his friend a wheelchair and arguably who wouldn't save a baby deer from a swimming pool on many occasions we have instinctive responses towards doing good but then there are the out of the way gut-wrenching choices that will cost us sometimes our lives that's nobility the choice to do something we don't have to do but something greater than us that urges us to push beyond our capacity if eternity is set in the heart of man ecclesiastes 3 11 it can certainly show in the most chaotic most adverse circumstances we insist this is profound we assist in making all things good by making noble choices in co-laboring with god in our personal response to chaos or darkness we get to reflect eternity outward to the secular world purposely haven't talked about this book for a bit because i always like to i wanted to just save it until i was speaking to you because i like having a break of a month or two and then coming back to talk about it to see if there's any revelation and and equally more of a distance to be able to look back and go what really gripped me about the story i was brought up religious and um and my parents were kind beautiful wonderful christians and noble in their own right um so i was inspired by my own parents at first as i got older you know i lost my father 23 i went through a lot of death and i was also experiencing a lot of religion and when i say religion is in the negative context in the sense of a lot of legalism a lot of rules that um was a difficulty for me in uh finding the compassion the mercy the understanding of people in their mass and so i would often find noble people that weren't believing in the lord and i would find people that weren't necessarily enabled that believed in the lord and so what i found myself doing a lot of these people would go what would jesus do which is a great question to ask until you start miscontextualizing it for your own needs to be met and what i would do is use the whole world what jesus did and then i would miscontextualize it and essentially i would do something that jesus wouldn't do in the end of the day because i was misconceptualizing if i asked the question what's the noble choice the noble choice is always the harder choice normally it normally requires more self-sacrifice and it actually also made me more accountable to what jesus would actually do and so i became obsessed and i had been all my life really on noble character i'd watch a film and break every time i would see someone not only just give up their life but choose the harder path rather than the easier path and i really believe that you know when i started can i moved over to california and i was inspired by church moving over here it was led by a pastor that was very noble very kind full of being able to see the very goodness in everyone else when i'd been witnessing so many churches fight with each other on what was right and what was wrong as opposed to taking noble action to unify to come together to actually take care of the orphans and the widows the social justice movements that were often being taken care of by other people that didn't believe in god and so what i wanted to do is challenge the church going this was actually our call to be noble the problem is we've mis we've misread nobility as perfect and i'm not looking for perfect yeah and that's i think it's actually that people have been nervous to buy the book is thinking gosh i don't really need to be told what else i'm doing wrong i don't need to be told where i'm getting it out of out of hand i'm i'm struggling enough as it is but actually the the noble quest for me was looking at stories reciting these stories that would be teaching mechanisms for other people to recognize actually we're not looking for perfect we're looking for humble we're looking for integral we're looking for um when we do make mistakes how we clean up the mess you know because we are human we will get it wrong and i was really nervous about writing the book because i was worried that writing about nobility meant that i would have to be noble all the time and that's a lot of pressure but if we can create ourselves to be students of the subject rather than so it's like fitness health really where where you know we all see these fantastic sort of greek adonises that we'd like to look like but but that feels that feels impossible you know to start from where we might be stuff but if we go step by step on every single day there is always a moment of opportunity there's not a day that goes without it in our lives where we can go what would be the noble choice in this interaction in this moment in this ability to gift to someone that is a forethought they're not asking to be loved but we have the opportunity to love them in a moment and i would say i've seen more conversions of people coming to the lord i've seen more evangelism take place in people's acts of kindness and nobility than actually preaching the gospel and essentially the acts of nobility are the the modeled way of evangelism as far as i'm concerned and i i want us to get back to being famous for loving well yeah and i think for as long in this year you know we've been witnessing some of these hardships and one of the chapters in the book is perseverance and injustice another one and how we're righteous and just end up in just moments if we can find these as opportunities to really model what nobility looks like then we actually start to really glorify our lord in the way that we were hoping to in the first place yeah it's so beautiful what you share and it's so life-changing it reminds me of a quote uh by uh francis of assisi you know preach the gospel use words if you have to you know we can yeah revealing the nature of jesus aren't we in those in those every moment and i love i love your humility in the book carrick carrie you know and you because you're being so honest and real about the process you know obviously you were it you went through like you say season of such loss and i know in the book you share about the fires that happened in reading in california when you were living there and just walking through some intense stuff and becoming sick and you know and the squeeze of the pressure and the pain and what it brings up inside of us in those moments hey i will you share a little bit more about that about what you went through because you wrestled with your in your inner world through that season didn't you gosh it just felt like it was one of those seasons that i'm like could anything go right at this moment's time all the areas that could go wrong were going wrong health finances sickness relationships even just everything was changing you know when the fires happen we lost a huge part of our community because we couldn't build house houses fast enough again i was very lucky to keep mine but i lost a lot of friends that left and moved into different cities across america because you know they they didn't want to wait yeah for a new house in a year's time so um it's interesting whenever the lord sometimes wants us to teach on a subject or share or impart wisdom on a subject he makes us go through that before so my year of perseverance 2018 yeah um and so i would say perseverance was taught to me a lot in 2018 and and i didn't realize how resilient we as humans can be until one of those seasons um and equally having to learn the importance of having community having people around you you know i talk about having pneumonia and how i had people around my bed praying and doing communion and taking the blood of jesus while i'm throwing up my own like it's just it wasn't a pretty sight it's that's the reality of the guttural grit of what we have to go through and you know i was i was feeling very happiest about certain things i didn't have a husband i wasn't married i decided to really go on the trajectory of like i don't have anyone here for me and i'm really lonely and what um what i realize is if we can just persevere through those seasons with community with sometimes everything is removed on purpose so that we just have our time with the lord and it's not because the law is removing them from us but it's an opportunity for recognizing oh we can actually gain so much amazing wisdom and faithfulness in this season and it's only that season that we get to learn that muscle we can't get it in a favored season yeah um it's a different muscle then yeah it's in those moments isn't it where you you say when you're relying on the faith and the strength of the of our friends of our community around us when we're really weak we so need each other and it's in those moments where everything is gone you realize where you're actually truly at internally you know what is going on in the condition of your heart and um yeah the lord really does a deep work there hey and it's also very easy to you know i was reading an awful lot about joseph over that time and you know it'd be referenced about the lord was with him and i'm like but he's in prison right now how could you know and we'd often find favorable circumstances would mean that the lord was with us you know but actually the lord's with us and the most heinous of times and i of course he is but sometimes we miss it because we're conditioning our understanding of what the lord with us looks like by favor rather than going he's with me in this moment and if i can actually just pull on his strength in this way and not go what are you not doing but what are you doing in the season then i was watching how joseph was still so faithful regardless of being put into captivity and in fact i think he would have been executed if it hadn't been for his integrity and his nobility by potiphar yes um and the accusation that happened from his wife i think he i i mean it would have been the next execution offense so the lord was with him because he saved his life from just put him into prison for him but still he's prophesying on people and i was so inspired by joseph that was still looking to serve other people even in a time that he could have got where i was going which was victim oh where is me why is anything working out you know it's it's a very easy road to go down and i think i needed inspiring stories i needed people that were in oppression that were facing a lot of adversity um you know i was reading even with rachel reckons to the irony as i was reading so much about martin luther king in 2008-2019 and then obviously i think everything starts kicking off in america 2020. um so already i was aware of the power of uh his ability to choose noble acts in times where the easier the easier road would have been to revenge and to partake in the riots and yeah um yeah extraordinary wisdom yes was there a moment i mean obviously you're talking about the process in the book of of the transformation that's going on inside of you um was there a moment where you just reached the end you were so overwhelmed but you were also so aware of your inner world and you went i don't want to live like this anymore i want to now shift and and reflect you jesus you know where you there was a point yeah it's funny actually because towards the end of that that particular year 2018 i think it was november i've got it down in my diary of what date it was i remember it was 7 55am and i don't normally no it's 705 am and i remember going i don't want to wake up this early at least at least at that time i'm waking up now but my bed was physically shaking and i thought we were in an earthquake that's what that's how strong it felt and um my bedroom door was open and i could see down the corridor and see that the books and everything in the other room down the corridor were shifting and moving like my room and uh and it went on for about five ten seconds and then stopped and i realized the actual physical entity of the shaking in my bed wasn't an earthquake but it was the lord waking me up and um and i don't mean just it was a this is a time to shift and shake and i'm shaking all the foundations quite literally in your life to recognize um i need you the calling that i've had on your life was much is is a calling that actually requires you to face a huge amount of adversity this is why you've actually gone through an awful lot of stuff that you have you built your character and so every time i go through adversity i see it now as an opportunity to build my character yeah and also with building we then get to reflect the gospel in a way that a lot of people are going how did you respond like that when i wouldn't have responded like that um i got inspired by what made the choice rather than gave in to the emotions and the feelings and the yeah but i deserve the entitlement there um you know and i think even as christians like you know but we're christians so we should have a good nice life right that's what we're you know and of course we thought it's joy but i i think sometimes we don't recognize the the power and the resilience and the tenacity that the lord's built in us the courage and the boldness that he's built in us and so the shaking real moment for me and that's when i knew i needed to start yeah and there'd been a couple of times yeah where pastors just sort of said it's time for you to write the book and i was actually going no i'm not qualified for it you know i don't i'm i don't know what to preach but i feel like i've got authority in i thought i've got an authority when you derived you did not exactly it shall be 85 years ago and i'll probably wear a small like i can see myself at 85 wearing a turban and holding a cane and sitting on a lovely i am now nobility i've known highly i've arrived and i can share with you my 85 years of experience it's just like it's harder it's just desperate to you know and it was just it was just an ego thing honestly it was this i i'm i was disqualifying myself because i was so worried about the the getting it wrong i was right and i you know i do get these things wrong so um the humility of being okay with getting it wrong and and not getting it right um is actually one of the most profound lessons and so uh this this when i change humility from not being perfect to just an excellence of moral beings then in that journey we can we can start apologizing aw toaster cause it the excellence of moral beings a lot of people especially in america thought that it was about loyal because nobility and noblemen are always seen as the sort of aristocratic side of things but i don't know this is actually about the character this is actually building and you hear people that was very noble of you um and i'm like we're losing that word in our voice if we're not careful it's being redefined yeah yeah i mean i love the way you express in the book as well that you know nobility really is is also about reflecting the nature of the of god of who he is and obviously we're made in his image and as as believers we have the privilege of being filled with his spirit so we actually in those moments it's not just about our own aspiration to reveal his goodness but it's actually about the supernatural capacity to be able to you know in that moment of surrender like you say you know each each moment whether it's i love the story you share about a beautiful young woman who gave her a pair of tennis shoes her trainers away to a homeless woman that didn't have any shoes you know in that moment in the pouring rain she chose to express the heart of god you know it was sacrificial obviously in that moment to her but but she did it and it changed a life you know and it's like giving a stopping and like heidi baker says stopping for the one you know in front of you in that moment just a smile you touch you touch a life you put you clothe them again with dignity you know in that moment it's so i mean and i love as well what you've said i think that's so important in ch instead of becoming a victim and you know sitting there in your pain you chose to be inspired you chose to study the life the detail of the normal people that have changed the world you know the world we all come into this well don't we and we're human beings and then you know by the choices we make and the strength of god within us you know we our lives become become vehicles of transformation you know it's um but i think that's imp i think that's very powerful to study the characteristics of those that have become neptune ability you know so tell me tell me tell me so i just could keep talking talking to you for ages we don't have very long left but tell me what you found when you studied the life of people like martin luther and gandhi and you know william wilberforce and other great reformers that we know of the famous reformers and others you know more hidden when you looked at their lives were there common characteristics did you did you draw from them something that was similar in each life that really changed you yeah i well it's interesting i i if we're talking about the famous ones for being noble because of course that was the other thing is everyone thought that nobility was a sort of supernatural gift that were given and it's only to this short few like a mother to raise it you know but actually i realized [Laughter] i'm that would take care of the team coffee at the the local church were as noble as the ones i'd been reading in books and and so what i wanted to look at is what is it that makes us as a community look to that person and go that person is a very noble person well above all they cared about other people i know that sounds like a very basic simple thing to do but they generally did care about other people on top of that their own adversity um you know gandhian what he faced martin luther king and what he faced mother teresa and in her sacrifice and what she experienced when she was younger as a woman they all took on the very pains and adversity of what they face and molded it into a space of like but my pain could be somebody else's game and it was that in itself and this is why people get nervous about nobility too because they're like well i don't have that calling on my life i've had a pretty christian life and i'm like but that's absolutely fine we still got spaces to be noble but the characteristics are manifested and amplified in these people that have a much harder life say william wilberforce um you know even though he had been born into wealth um established i don't know whether you've ever looked into illegal force and the things that he did but he didn't just establish um you know the abolition of the slave trade he also established so many different non-profits everything from the rspca i don't know whether you know that i didn't he actually cared about the cruelty around so all of these different non-profits actually started by one guy and you know and he had a crow in his house that couldn't fly i didn't know if you knew that but that would be that great lies yeah i know it's just animals isn't it yeah yeah full of animals that are just needing you know shelter because they can't take care of themselves and so it he just embodied this desperate and i think that's what happens when we completely surrender to the abundance of his gaze on us yeah and i'm just going to bother you because i'm trying to navigate my life on my own it's a really bad idea yeah and when he just starts to gaze on us then we overflow with his loves and then makes us we stop looking inward at our own pain and also we actually have the bravery and the courage to face the pain i don't really believe in gliding the pain quickly by fixing it with a scripture i actually think pain is there for us to recognize as a problem and we bring the problem to our lord we confront it we navigate it and we actually get rid of that thing much quicker because we finally confronted it rather than hide behind our religion higher behind our faith we actually bring it to him and so what i've noticed that these people are actually pretty good at dealing with pain and i do actually recognize as well there are certain flaws in the people that i've mentioned as well and why what happened with those flaws why did they happen you know um and i think again it's because we weren't in a culture at that time we're getting better we weren't in the culture at the time that actually celebrated the ability to process pain well um so the characteristics i list them don't i in the book of these sort of seven different virtues of um righteousness and self-sacrifice integrity humility wisdom courage and um you know love being one of the main ones and i i finished i sort of collated all of these similar characteristics between all of these different people you know using my whiteboard at home and they covered with so you drew you drew those from your observations did you they were the consistent ones that you put in your book yeah brilliant i don't know i had index cards of all of the listings of all of the different things so i had index cards of humility and integrity courage wisdom and before i knew it i had these seven seven main virtues that you need they all wear a carousel with each other you couldn't really be noble without one without the other other if that makes sense you can be generous but you may not self sacrifice because you might be very wealthy but what is it like when you have got any money in your bank account you know so yeah it was a case of the noble nobility is always a cost for us and and i've got somewhere in my home i've got a quote that just says let it cost you something because the cost is so much more beautiful to be rewarded in heaven and and there is such a reward you can hear a cloud of witnesses celebrating when you when they see a cost that you made that actually multiplies this butterfly effect of goodness and kindness um and so it's it's a it's a study it's and like you say a movement but it's a study and if we can keep start to keep each other accountable of making noble gestures as opposed to doing the writer one thing then um then it's more inspiring it's more fun it's more adventurous it is it is and i love the fact that you know it's about fundamentally you say it's about being authentic authentically caring about people you know and moving the heart of god with the with the choices that we make i mean every moment of kindness we're we're collaborating with him in the expression of his goodness aren't we and we're moving his heart and then we get filled with more of his love which compels us on even further and the whole experience is fulfilling you know liberating and fulfilling and transformational is actually the invitation that you extend in the book to the way of life we were created to live anyway but i just think this is a practical roadmap in from what you've discovered through your own journey through your own pain this far so it's amazing so interest in finishing we've got about a minute left would you is there anything that you would just encourage the family watching all over the world that they can do as a practical next step if you know they're in the midst of tremendous difficulty right now you know to get them to get them to move forward in this life of operating in the beauty of who jesus is and ability of christ i think um i think the thing that i would suggest and it's funny as you were saying and asking that question i felt the words it's time to get inspired and then yeah we've got enough time right now um and not distracted fired as different to being distracted so yeah it's time to get inside inspired by other people's stories by history historic accounts of where people gave up some beautiful things but gained so much more from the sacrifice of it um it's time to to be inspired by connecting with each other in community and it's time to be inspired by how do we personally want to grow and and equally try to even though it's hard to catch the lord off guard with the things that we're choosing to do in noble acts of kindness and there's a substance to it so seeking substance rather than performance is probably the most impactful thing of my life in the journey of discovering nobility and the more you're curious about it the more the lord shows you people in your life like that and so i've been so blessed by my meeting and and being inspired by other people as soon as i got hungry and you'll know this too i'm sure liz every time you get hungry on a subject the lord just starts lifting and opening all these different stories and different people in your life you're like wow i had no idea it was like that so yeah fine yeah wonderful oh yeah i love that i love that carrie thank you so much for being on today you are an inspiration honestly oh it's so easy thank you it's so good to spend time with you and thank you all for giving us your precious time today i'm sure you loved everything that we've just talked about and where it's carried just in finishing really quickly where can people find you if they want to get a copy of the book if they want to look at you know get just connect with you how do they do that yeah um you can get get the copy amazon or barnes noble all great bookstores um okay good yeah and then carrie lloyd.live is my website as well so i think you can get it through there as well um but yeah and then i have passed and pete talks about these things all the time so if you don't want to buy the book necessarily but wanting to hear a little bit more of you brilliant brilliant oh no it's a total joy being with you and thank you all and have the most amazing week and look forward to being with you all again next week god bless [Music] you

Channel: Liz Wright

Views: 3,732

Rating: 4.9764705 out of 5

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Id: CuyIY-AOmfI

Length: 31min 52sec (1912 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021